The Story of Isaac Brock: Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada/6

The means for transit through Canada at this time was most primitive, and not the least of the questions which occupied Brock's thoughts was the important one of transportation. The lack of facilities for moving large bodies of men and supplies, in event of war, was as apparent as was the lack of vessels of force on lake and river.

Between Quebec and Montreal, a distance of sixty leagues, the overland journey was divided into twenty-four stages, requiring four relays of horse-caleches in summer and horse-carioles in winter. The time occupied was three days, and the rate for travellers twenty-five cents a league. This rough road—which entailed numerous ferries in summer at the Ottawa and at Lake St. Francis, except for a break of fifty miles—led by Cornwall and Prescott to Kingston, along which route United Empire Loyalists twenty years before had established themselves.

A few years prior to Brock's arrival, Governor Simcoe, with the men of the Queen's Rangers, had cut a roadway through the dense forest between Prescott and Burlington, at the head of Lake Ontario. From Ancaster, the then western limit of the U.E. Loyalists' settlement, this road traversed the picturesque region that surrounded the Mohawk village on the Grand River, where Joseph Brant, the famous warrior, was encamped with his Six Nation Indians. From this point it penetrated the roll[Pg 41]ing lands of the western peninsula, to the La Trenche (the Thames River), from whence Lake St. Clair and the Detroit outlet to the great lakes was reached by water. Another military road, also built by Simcoe, followed the old Indian trail through thirty-three miles of forest from York to Lake Simcoe. This shorter route to Lake Superior enabled the North-West Fur Company—established by Frobisher and McTavish, of Montreal, in 1776—to avoid canoeing up the Ottawa and its tortuous tributaries. The batteaux were brought up the St. Lawrence, breaking bulk at certain "carrying places," then under sail up Lake Ontario to York. From here the cargoes were hauled by horses over Yonge's military road to Lake Simcoe, thence by river and stormy Lake Huron to Fort Michilimackinac, Great Turtle Island—the Mackinaw of to-day—at the head of Lake Michigan. By this route fifty dollars was saved on every ton of freight from Ottawa to the middle north. At Mackinaw the goods were reshipped by bark canoe to the still remoter regions in the further West, where Spanish pedlars on the southern tributaries of the lower Mississippi traded with the Akamsea Indians in British goods distributed from Mackinaw.

The records of these trips through a wilderness of forest and stream, with their exhilarating hardships, had a singular fascination for Isaac Brock. It was not long before he had won, with his conquering ways and robust manhood, the allegiance of the big-hearted fur-traders in Montreal. Their wild legends of the great fur country rang in his ears, and his receptive mind was soon stored with the exploits of Radisson and Groseillers, Joliette, Marquette, and other famous pathfinders, with whose[Pg 42] exploits a century and a half before, aided by his fluency in French, he became wonderfully familiar.

He found the evolution of the Canadian highway a subject of absorbing interest. From his Caughnawaga guides he learned how the tracks made by lynx and beaver, rabbit and wolverine, wolf and red deer—invariably the safest and firmest ways—were in turn naturally followed by Indian voyageur and fur-trader, until the blazed trail became the bridle-road for the pack-horse of the pioneer. This, as the white settler drifted in, became the winter-road; then, as civilization stifled the call of the wild, there uprose from swamp and muskeg the crude corduroy, expanding by degrees into the half-graded highway, until the turnpike and toll-bar, with its despotic keeper, exacted its tribute from progress. This was the prelude to a still more amazing transformation, for the day soon came, though not in our hero's time, when the drumming of the partridge was silenced by the choo-choo of the locomotive as it shrieked through forest and beaver-meadow on its way to vaster tracks, further and further west, disclosing and leaving in its trail an empire of undreamed-of fertility. Then the redman, disturbed in his solitudes, was confronted with civilization, and had to accept the terms of conquest or seek another sanctuary in the greater wilderness beyond.

The navigation of the lakes and rivers at this time was limited to three types of vessel, the "snow," a three-master with a try-sail abaft the mainmast, the schooner, the batteau and the birch canoe, and, in closely land-locked waters, the horse ferry. The Durham boat, a batteau on a larger scale with false keel, had yet to be introduced. The bark[Pg 43] canoe, which for certain purposes has never been improved upon—not even excepting the cedar-built canoe—varied in size from nine to thirty feet, or, in the language of the voyageur, from one and a half to five fathoms. These canoes had capacity for a crew of from one to thirty men, or a cargo of seventy "pieces" of ninety pounds each, equal to three tons, exclusive of provisions for nine paddlers. In these arks of safety, manned by Indians or metis (half-breeds), the fur-trader would leave Lachine, on the St. Lawrence, ascend the Ottawa, descend the French, cross Lake Huron—the Lake Orleans of Nicollet and Hennepin—and find no rest from drench or riffle until he reached Mackinaw, or more distant Fort Dearborn (now Chicago), on the Skunk River, at the head of Lake Michigan, 1,450 miles by water from Quebec.

The batteaux—great, open, flat-bottomed boats, forty feet long and eight feet beam, pointed at stem and stern—were not unlike the York boats used in Lord Wolseley's Red River expedition in 1870, and would carry five tons of cargo. Rigged with a movable mast stepped almost amid-ships, and a big lug-sail, these greyhounds of the lakes were, for passengers in our hero's time, often the only means of water transport between Quebec and Little York. As important factors in the transport of soldiers and munitions in the war of 1812, they deserve description.

While sailing well when before the wind, they yet, with their defective rig and keelless bottoms, carrying no weather helm, made little headway with the wind close abeam. On one occasion Isaac Brock left Lachine with a brigade of five batteaux, so that all hands could unite in making the portages. At the Cascades, the Milles Roches[Pg 44] and the Cedars, three-quarters of the cargo had to be portaged by the packmen. At times these lightened boats were poled or tracked through the broken water, towed by the men, from such foothold as the rocky banks afforded, by means of a long lariat tied to the boat's bow, with loops over each trackman's shoulder, one man steering with a long sweep. When this treadmill work was impossible, owing to too steep banks, and where no batteau locks existed, the crew hauled the boats across the portage on a skidway of small rolling logs, and, so journeying, Prescott was reached. Here, the wind being favourable, lug-sails were hoisted and Brock's strange fleet started for Kingston, reaching it after twelve days' toil from Lachine, then coasting further along Lake Ontario to Little York (Toronto). When wind failed, the long oars were used, the men rising from the thwarts to pull, standing. Thus, alternately sitting and rising, pulling in unison, the light-hearted voyageurs would break into one of their wild French chants, quaint with catching refrain, in which our hero soon learned to join.

At Prescott Brock sometimes took the Government schooner, paying two guineas for a trip, which might last a week, or caught one of the small "two-stickers" that carried freight between Kingston and Queenston. If much pressed for time, the batteau would be exchanged for a caleche—the stage-coach was as yet only a dream—and he would resign himself to a rude jolting over the colonization road through the forest that flanked the rugged northern shore of Lake Ontario.

These trips were a never-failing source of surprise and profit. The skill of the canoemen, the strength and endur[Pg 45]ance of the packmen, excited his admiration. What wonderful raw material! Given drill and discipline, what might not be achieved on the frontier with such craftsmen! The muscles, all whipcord, of these rugged Canadians, part coureur de bois, part scout, amazed him. One thing was not so evident as he could have wished. Their love seemed to be more for race and language, home and wilderness, than for King and country. Perhaps, as he said, if the safety of their homes were threatened, they would develop patriotism of the highest type.

But, after all, as to kings, "Who," they naively asked him, "was their king? Surely they must be under two flags and two kings. Napoleon or George? Que voulez vous?"

As their hearts seemed to be as stout as their limbs, they would, he reflected, be unconquerable, these careless children of waste places. While Brock thus communed, he watched. There was little to choose between them—Narcisse, Baptiste, Louis, Jacques, Pierre—all strong as buffalo, all agile as catamounts.

They would lift the "pieces" from the dripping canoe and land them on the slippery rock. A minute later and Narcisse perhaps would appear, a bit bent, to keep balanced a bag of flour, a chest of tea, a caddy of tobacco and sundry packages of sugar or shot that made up the load resting on his shoulders where body and nape of neck joined. This load was supported and held together by a broad moose-hide band—a tump-line—strapped across his forehead, his upraised hands grasping the narrowing moose-hide stretched on either side of his lowered head, between ear and shoulder. Brock would watch these packmen as,[Pg 46] thus handicapped with a load weighing from two to five hundred pounds, they set out across the rough portage, singing, and at a dog trot, following each other in quick succession. There was rivalry, of course, duly encouraged by Brock with a promise of tobacco to the first man in, but it was all good-natured competition, the last man chanting his laughing canzonet as loudly as the first.

Our hero, with his grand physique and cleverness, was not long in mastering the tricks of the carriers. He soon learned to build up a load and adjust a tump-line, after which practice made the carrying of a pack almost twice his own weight a not extraordinary performance.

These trips afforded Brock an opportunity to study Indian character. He learned much from the packman and voyageur that was destined to be of great value to him in his career on the western frontier, among the outposts of civilization.

Little escaped his notice. His faculties were sharpened by contact with these children of the wilds, whose only class-room was the forest, their only teacher, nature. As the crushed blade or broken twig were of deepest import to the Indian scout, so no incident of his life was now too trivial for Brock to dismiss as of no importance.